The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Fifty Three: Duel

The goblins announced their arrival with a roar that shook the tower to its foundations. More hands reached into its wound, pulling away brick after brick. Small goblins crawled inside, clinging to the walls like bugs. Every eye burned brightly with the power of the seed. It drove them, called to them, and they listened to Knut's every command.

I answered them with a call of my own, as garbled and guttural as it was.

They swarmed towards me, baring their teeth at the faeries that pressed me down into the stone floor. The goblins surged in, gushing through the hole in the tower's side like blood from a wound and the guards rushed forward, flinging themselves at the hoard to defend the council.

The two forces slammed into each other with enough force to send a boom cracking through the air. There was a flash of light, bright and blinding. My eyes burned and my ears ached. I felt the many faerie hands release me and others took its place, familiar thin fingers, cold, clammy claws.

"Queen Matilda." I lifted my head shakily and through a veil of knotted hair, soaked in blood not my own, I saw Snorri's face peering worriedly down at me. His claws gingerly traced the bloody gash arcing across my back from my right shoulder to my left side. "I'm sorry. I tried to catch you when you fell. I was too slow. If I'd been faster maybe..." Above his head, the air turned green with the comings and goings of goblin souls while the floor beneath me grew slick with silver blood.

"I am fine, Snorri. It worked out in the end. We've made it through the city's impenetrable walls and soon, it will all be ours." I winced as he touched the very tender spot on my side where the blade had cut deeper.

"Sorry." He reeled his hand away with a grimace. "Again."

"Look in my cloak pocket." I motioned with my head towards it. "I should have more healing tonic."

His wings unfurled around me, cocooning me in their leathery membrane. He rummaged around in the pocket until he found a bottle of tonic then held it to my mouth as I gulped it down. The potion went to work immediately. The pain slowly subsided and I could feel my flesh stitching itself back together until not even a faint scar would remain.

"You dropped this." Chimed a certain pig nosed goblin. He held out my dagger to me with his small, grubby hands, his freakish face filling my vision.

"Ebbe," I grinned. "How good of you to join us."

"King says not to let you die," Ebbe mirrored my smile.

"Agi's here too?" I asked.

"He'd rather die than miss this." Ebbe cackled, high pitched and sinister. "Just listen to their screaming. Sqwaking like a bunch of startled birds."

I did hear it. I heard the council, weak and powerless within the thorns' choking protection, crying out in horror. There was a guttural scream, the kind only made my dying men and beneath all that, beneath all the sounds of war, was the distant song of thousands of voices screaming in unified terror and the laughter of the goblin hoard having the time of their lives.

Taking back my dagger, the eerie feeling of being naked on a battlefield subsided. Snorri helped me shakily to my feet. As we stood, Snorri's wings tucked back against his back, revealing the slaughter happening all around us.

The goblins were circling the Council, corralling them in a single spot. They nipped at the men's' ankles with vicious teeth, their eyes alight with their god-king's powerful influence. An enormous goblin with the horns of a bull danced around with a guard skewered through his middle on his horns. With every movement, his lifeless body flopped around on his head, his wings nothing but bloody stubs. Another lay at the foot of Mab's throne, well the upper half of him was, His lower half was lost beneath the pounding feet of the countless goblins pouring into the tower. Their mass churned and pulsed as they flailed their limbs with joyful ferocity. This was a party for them. The party of a lifetime.